One dimensional PONG is a great use for LED strips

[Jason] has had a five meter addressable RGB LED strip lying around for a while, and only recently came up with a good idea of what to use it for. He came up with One Dimensional PONG, and it looks like it’s a blast to play. Instead of moving a paddle up and down, [Jason]’s 1D PONG game requires the players to stomp on a switch to send the ball back to the other player.

The LED strip [Jason] used has an SPI interface, but needed to be PWM clocked to a microcontroller to operate. After whipping up an Arduino library for his LED strip, [Jason] built an ATMega328-based controller board and a pair of seven segment display boards to keep track of the score. There’s a technical overview in another one of [Jason]’s videos.

[Jason] will be taking his 1D PONG game to the Brighton Mini Maker Faire on September 8th. We’re sure his game will be very popular there, so if you see him, tell him Hackaday sent you.

That’s awesome! Could the switches be replaced with pressure sensitive ones instead? That way you could add the ability for a player to control the speed of the return by the pressure they use to hit the switch.

Nice idea – I want to extend it to make the return speed depend on timing, like how daringly late you leave the return – but pressure is a nice idea too. Another idea I had was different buttons to push depending on the colour of the light. For such a basic idea there are a lot of possibilities!

I thought about the option to make the endpoints in a permanently turned on LED, and let these move to each other while a ‘rally’ is going on, thus making the track shorter and shorter; that way the game keeps challenging even if you get practiced!

Sound effects wise a mp3 board with sound samples from a championship tennis match would be quite an addition, imagine the *grunt*thwack* sound playing when you bat the ‘ball’ back to the other player and crowd cheers when a point is won, and the umpire calling out the score etc.